Fellow Georgians, recently something has come across my radar that I’d like to bring to your awareness if you haven’t already heard about it. I had heard rumblings about it a while back, but unfortunately it seems to have become a reality.
I got a call several days back from a friend in North Georgia who is a dairy farmer. He wanted me to be aware about what he was going through, not just because I serve as the Chairman of the Senate Ag Committee but because I’m a farmer as well. He recently lost 300 acres of rented cropland that he farmed, because the family had sold it for development. He needed the land to support his dairy, so he made the decision to clear cut 150 acres of timberland he owned with the intention of converting it into crop land.
He made a deal with a logger friend to cut his timber and thought all was well, until his logger friend came back to him a week later and told him he couldn’t cut his timber because the two mills in his market area couldn’t accept his wood because of the new EU mandate that they will not allow products sold or produced in their countries to come from timberland that is not reforested.
